Study Reveals the Roots of Black Underachievement

As Signithia Fordham looks back at her four years at a Washington
high school, she recalls going to class, to basketball games, to the
arcade, and to just about anywhere else students would go.

Ms. Fordham was not a student, but, rather, a student of students.
She hoped, as an anthropologist, to understand why so many
African-American children appeared to be failing in school.

Nearly a decade after she entered the school that she has given the
fictitious name "Capital High School,'' Ms. Fordham continues to
analyze the data she gathered there, and the black population she
studied continues to be plagued by underachievement.

Although Ms. Fordham's influence on national discussions of the
problem has grown, her basic findings have not become any easier to
hear or accept.

The African-American students that she examined, Ms. Fordham
concluded, often did poorly in school because they could not reconcile
being academically successful with being black.

Just when such students gained in terms of academic achievement,
they feared losing in terms of racial identity. They did not believe
academic success would gain them acceptance by white Americans, but
they did believe it would alienate them from other African-Americans,
and, by obtaining it, they would be "left, forever, sitting on the
fence,'' Ms. Fordham observes.

"Success, and especially academic success, was extremely costly,''
Ms. Fordham says. Even today, she notes, "Students say, 'I wonder how
important it is to transform my identity as a black person in order to
achieve success?'''

"To imitate another,'' she says, "is so painful for many people that
many say, 'Chuck it. I don't want it.'''

While not believing her findings can resolve such inner struggles,
Ms. Fordham does express hope that her research will help sensitize
society to the problem, and weaken some of the forces that cause such
struggles to take place.

"I think it is about time to say, 'We need to make some changes in
terms of the norms,''' Ms. Fordham says. "The norms are not appropriate
for the varied populations that we must serve.''

Civil Rights Goals Elusive

Currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Rutgers
University, Ms. Fordham believes that a different attitude prevailed
when she went through elementary and secondary school, during the
civil-rights movement.

"I had parents who were extremely pushy about education, who saw it
as a commodity, as a way of altering the limited future that I
otherwise may have as an African-American woman,'' Ms. Fordham
recalls.

Perceived as academically successful, Ms. Fordham felt some pressure
to shun such success, but it did not seem nearly "as intense or
pervasive'' as the pressures she later observed at Capital High. The
prevailing pressures, she says, were "to get good grades and be good
citizens.''

But as she went on to college and studied to be an anthropologist,
Ms. Fordham watched young African-Americans move in a direction she had
not anticipated.

Instead of seeking the integration with white society that the
civil-rights movement had promised to make more possible, she notes,
many chose, instead, to cling more tightly to the black identity that
white society stigmatized.

Although she had been raised to believe that academic achievement
was simply a function of hard work, Ms. Fordham seemed to hear only
about academic failure among black children.

"Why is it,'' she poses, "that resistance to 'acting white' has
become so prevalent among African-American students?''

A growing number of educators appear to be asking the same
questions, she asserts.

Eager to find explanations, she began her work in Capital High in
1982, and plans to embark on new studies soon.

Back to School

Ms. Fordham refuses to disclose the identity of Capital High School
for the sake of protecting the privacy and confidentiality of the
students she observed there.

In her studies, Ms. Fordham describes the school as located in a
predominantly black section of Washington, D.C., and functioning
essentially as a "magnet school,'' with students coming there from
distant neighborhoods and all socioeconomic segments of the city.

During the first year of her study, with the permission of parents
and school officials, Ms. Fordham designated as "key informants'' a
group of 33 male and female 11th-grade students--12 of whom were
considered high achievers, 21 of whom were considered underachievers.
She interviewed them, analyzed them, and spent almost every day,
including weekends, in the field with them, observing them both in
school and out.

In the second year of her study, Ms. Fordham surveyed 600 students
in grades 9 through 12. During the subsequent two years, she did
follow-up research and conducted additional interviews at the
school.

Her goal, Ms. Fordham writes in one recent journal article, was to
try "to understand why, how, and at what cost African American
adolescents achieve school success.''

Fear of 'Acting White'

Looking back on her field work, Ms. Fordham says she was
"flabbergasted'' by the amount of resistance to "acting white'' that
she encountered among black students at Capital High School.

"I never believed it would be so pervasive, and so pronounced, and
so academically stifling,'' she says.

While many students had parents who, like hers, pushed them to get
good grades, almost all appeared to feel a countervailing force, the
pull of "fictive kinship.''

Anthropologists generally define fictive kinship as a kinship-like
relationship between people who are not related by blood or marriage.
Among black Americans, Ms. Fordham says, it symbolizes a sense of
"peoplehood'' in opposition to white society, and is closely tied to
behaviors that are culturally patterned and that tend to separate
whites and blacks.

In contrast to the individualistic, competitive ethos that
characterizes most schools, the fictive kinship of black Americans
tends to lead them to see their own chances of success as linked with
the success of their peers and community. As a result, they emphasize
group loyalty in situations involving conflict or competition with
white Americans, Ms. Fordham says.

When black students seek to reaffirm themselves as members of their
culture, she contends, they tend to unwittingly insure their academic
failure, primarily because aspects of African-American culture are
viewed negatively in the school context and in the larger context of
American society.

For example, black students may run afoul of educators by using
their culturally sanctioned speech patterns or interactional styles, or
by working cooperatively on projects when asked to be competitive.

Conversely, black students often disparage as "acting white'' such
school-sanctioned behaviors as using standard English, spending time in
the library, writing poetry, or working hard to get good grades.

Success and Silence

To enhance their possibility of academic success, she points out,
many black students pragmatically distance themselves from their
fictive kinship, and instead seek to develop a sense of
"racelessness.'' But that can lead them to be stigmatized by peers and
to feel an erosion of self-confidence and a loss of their sense of
belonging, Ms. Fordham says.

Well-intentioned educators, she notes, sometimes speed up this
process, and stir up the internal conflicts within black children, by
seeking to protect high-achievers from negative peer pressures by
removing them from their regular classrooms and placing them in more
homogeneous, higher-level classes where white students often
predominate.

One of Ms. Fordham's more recent studies, published in the
Anthropology and Education Quarterly, focuses on one academically
successful Capital High student, Rita, and her struggle to maintain her
identity in an environment where achievement cast doubts on her not
just as an African-American, but as an African-American woman.

At Capital High, Ms. Fordham notes, high-achieving black females
tend to be silent. Their overriding goal is to be taken seriously in a
male-dominated society.

Underachieving females, by contrast, tend to be highly visible and
well-known, and to embrace their fictive kinship. Their grade point
averages are often far below what they could be.

With a grant from the National Science Foundation, Ms. Fordham
currently is examining quantitative data from her surveys, as well as
her ethnographic research, in an effort to gain a better understanding
of the lives of black girls.

"I am extremely interested in looking at women and competition,''
she says. "I want to uncover some of the problems that come about as a
result of how women are socialized.''

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